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Brood of a New Age
91.
"Are we really doing this, Goliath?" asked Brooklyn, who had pulled his clan leader aside.
"The kids are the only ones who know where he is."
"Nashville is close to Graziella's heart. She will, if we refuse to take her, go back to the estate alone. We just have to follow her."
Goliath's square jaw quirked under a gentle smile. "You just admitted that the children like each other."
His second felt himself blush.
"Yes. Maybe so. But-"
"Can we afford to delay the rescue any longer? Let's take them."
"I don't trust her for a second to stay out of it if it comes to a fight. She only knows flying bullets from cartoons where no one ever gets seriously shot. She's a kid, she can't assess risk."
"No - she can't. But... what's going to happen is going to happen. No one knows that better than you, Brooklyn."
Goliath put a hand on his shoulder. Taking risks, making mistakes. Accepting losses even when you suspect terrible things might happen. That, too, was part of the burden of a clan leader.
Brooklyn nodded.
Meanwhile, Graziella had approached the gargoyle who had scared her to death only last night and who now stood like a heap of misery with Angela a little apart, looking over the city with worry lines.
"Broadway?" the child called out, and the gargoyle, so much larger and heavier, winced in fright and turned around, eyes wide. Graziella looked up at him, lips compressed into a thin line. Only Angela's tight grip around Broadway's upper arm kept him from backing away, and she too spoke.
"Graziella. Thanks again for coming to tell us about Nashville."
"If I could rescue him alone, I would have," she said, her shaky voice becoming steadier and more confident halfway through the sentence. She was afraid. The image of the roaring white-eyed rampaging gargoyle was still freshly burned in her mind. But she had sworn to herself to become stronger. In every way, she had to become stronger. So it was a bad time to nurse a trauma. And since the turquoise gargoyle obviously didn't have enough balls to make the first move herself, she did. As the "bigger" person.
"Broadway, you will carry me. To my house."
"Me?" he asked incredulously.
Graziella smirked patronizingly. "You need this."
"But ... I was... I was a monster."
"Real monsters don't blubber," Graziella commented dryly. And with a frantic movement, Broadway wiped the tears from his cheeks.
She stepped up to him and took his hand, which yesterday she thought she was going to tear her apart.
"I won't forget what happened yesterday. But I forgive you. I need to grow and get stronger. For Nashville and everyone else I have to protect in the future. Tony ... all the Dracons, must have been terrible to you and your family. I can't undo that. But you and I, or the whole clan and I ... we can start over. I am a new kind of Dracon."
Broadway stared at her for several long seconds. Then a grin spread across his face, so desperate and so relieved at the same time that even Angela's eyes moistened.
"You're an incredible girl," Broadway said softly.
Graziella shrugged her shoulders. "I know. I'm awesome." She held out her arms like a small child asking an adult to pick her up. And it was nothing else, after all. As gently as he usually turned the egg at the Rookery, Broadway picked her up. His massive arms held Graziella like the most precious thing on the planet and her arms automatically found his neck.
So he and Angela joined the others. Elisa was already in Goliath's arms.
"We are ready," Graziella announced.
"And you? I could carry you," Coldstone said to Sonny. The teenager shook his head with a repulsed face.
"Sorry. But flying's not my thing. Never will be. I'll take my dirtbike. I'll be faster than you think." He looked at Graziella in the arm of the inhuman creature, which held her, again seriously.
"Just make sure nothing happens," he threatened the gargoyle, and his bossgirl grinned in her inimitably charming Dracon way.
"With me, they will have nothing to fear," she said, making more than one clan member laugh.
"Okay. Let's save Nashville," Goliath announced.
A minute later Sonny was gone in one of the elevators and all the gargoyles were in the air.
Xanatos and Fox watched the silouettes glide away.
"Always phenomenal to see the clan as a whole."
"Including addition," Fox said. Her husband looked at her from the side and noticed how strangely languorous her gaze was following the squadron. There was a warmth in her eyes that she basically only showed when she held Alex in her arms.
"Graziella is really a special girl," he murmured.
"Yes," she said softly.
"We had another visitor while everyone was gathered in the rookery," Owen - cat-like approached silently as he usually does from behind.
The couple turned around with questioning faces.
.
.
"My brother came here to get his knife splints?" asked Grace incredulously even now after seeing the footage from each of the surveillance cameras in the castle for the second time. She, Luca, Owen, David and Fox were standing in one of the security rooms.
"I guess he didn't come just to be chased around by the beasts," Luca said, wincing even at the second recording from the battlements when it briefly looked like Fu dog had his calf between her teeth.
"He got his bracers back with the knives," Grace repeated grimly. "That can only mean trouble."
"Yeah, probably, he'd only need them if he wanted to hurt someone or expected to kill someone," Xanatos surmised, withstanding the taller red female's weary gaze.
"Yeah, probably just because of that," she admitted.
"The question is why," Luca said. By now, the montage of recordings was running for the third time. Luca tapped on a clip where Dante was running by.
"There he is shouting something. He keeps talking on each of the recordings. Can we hear what he's saying?"
"Owen?" said Xanatos.
"Yes, sir."
Xanatos' aide typed on one of the keyboards in front of the screens. Then barking, growling, the rising of clawed feet could be heard. And in the middle, Dante's almost panicked voice.
"I don't want to hurt you or your clan or the egg! I just want to save the kids, damn it!"
"Cazzo," Grace muttered, leaning involuntarily against Luca, who clasped her upper arms with his hands to keep her upright.
"He knows about Nashville. And ... another child?"
"Nashville and Graziella. Dante knows about the kids," Xanatos admitted.
"You knew about this?"
"I've been able to follow Nashville's footsteps sporadically outside the castle. Dante helped both kids last week. He knew about both of them. Just how he knows now where Nashville is being held - which he obviously does. And got his knives because he expects a fight, I didn't know about that."
A new recording, also with sound was played. Dante's voice approaching and then dying away as he ran down a long hallway.
"He's calling for help. I've never heard my brother call for help," Grace said, pressing her claws into the flesh above her bosom as if her heart ached and the pressure on it would make it better.
"He's not calling out for himself," Fox said. "Not in the first place. The first footage showed him looking into rooms to find people. To find anybody."
"Yes. He was looking for help because of the kids. He was looking for us and couldn't find us because we were all in the rookery."
"I have to help him," Grace said grimly. "We can't stay out of it now. If Dante is involved ... and, despite his abilities, felt it necessary to glide back up to the castle to look for reinforcements and get his knives, then the matter is much bigger than anyone thinks. With only five or ten Minions of a single gangster boss - my brother could handle that."
"Other syndicates? A gang war?" said Luca.
"Or quarrymen. The whole clan could be walking into a trap!" speculated Xanatos, to which Grace sucked in a hissing breath.
"I'm going to help Dante. You'll have to give me back the weapon I had to hand in when I arrived here," she said growling.
Xanatos smiled at the two Italians.
"I was hoping you'd say that, Grace. But this piece of junk is completely inappropriate to your skills. I coincidentally have just the right equipment. The right caliber for someone of your caliber. Owen, take these two to the special weapons room. Fox and I will slip into something more comfy until then."
Gladly sir. I'll also put all the cleanup crews in motion.
"Let's get everything we have in motion, Owen. The clan and the kids need us."
.
.
He hung up the phone, took a deep breath ... and then started laughing out loud. After a few seconds, there was a knock on the door and one of his bodyguards came in. Not that he needed bodyguards, per se. Jon Canmore didn't need any. John Castaway did. He needed to maintain his cover. At least until the rest of the city, the country, the world saw that his mission was a noble one.
"Mister Castaway?" the man asked. He was loyal and looked at him with puppy eyes believing he would fix all the evil in the world. Just the way Jon liked it. And he would, after all, fix the evil of this world. At least as far as the gargoyles were concerned. He had been collecting money for months, pulling donations together from legal and anything but legal sources. The Illuminati were very generous. They also helped him hide the money from the authorities. He already had enough funds to buy all the weapons he wanted and was already in negotiations with partners around the world. Only more important were his negotiations with certain companies in the former Eastern Bloc countries, which, with enough capital, would mix him a virus that would infect only Gargoyles. The demon who was still posing as the CEO of Nightstone unlimited would look pretty stupid when her own damn species faced the fate she had planned for humanity.
He stood up, restrained his laughter and walked around his desk until he was standing in front of his co-worker.
"The dice of God always fall right, Sophocles had a point there," he said, patting him on the shoulder. "Just now I got a call from one of our spotters who's been following up on promising calls. And we finally got one."
"Their leader?" The man's eyes lit up like a child's at Christmas.
"Better," Castaway said. "We've got one of their cubs. It's a real monster. That we get this opportunity tonight, of all nights, when we have special audience, is a sign. We show them by destroying their cub that they have no future. Just as they threaten the future of mankind. Notify all patrols that are out there. Including the one with Marshall. He will be our spokesman that all eyes of the world will be on us."
Jon returned to his desk, pulled a small key from his shirt collar and opened the bottom drawer. In it he had "pocket money." To his own people he had stated for a gargoyle of any size he would pay a million. The rumor had spread, of course. For normal people that was a lot of money. That Dracon now demanded more was only natural - these criminals had no honor - but they loved influence and money. That's why this little maggot wanted to be part of the transaction and even determine the place of delivery. Rattling the chains of the monster a little to feel big and important. Influence and money. As long as Castaway had either of those to show for it, the city's criminals, whose business was made much more difficult by the deceptively decent "vocation" of the gargoyles, were his best allies.
"The enemy of my enemy is my best friend," Jon whispered, counting off standardized bundles of money until there were two million on the table. His bodyguard looked a little uncertain, even a little critical.
"What's the matter? Chickening out in the face of our triumph? It happens to the best of us."
"It's not that, sir, I'm behind the mission. Just... if you killed one of their kids on camera... wouldn't that turn the population against us? Some people are sensitive to that. Baby schema and all that."
Jon looked at him dumbfounded for a moment, then laughed while pulling from another compartment a handy silver case in which he made the money disappear.
"We probably don't have to worry about that. That thing has a beak. No fluffy or humanoid face - no baby face. Besides, it's supposed to be a fierce little monster. It will growl and light up its eyes like they all always do. It's their instinct in battle and against overpowering enemies to mask their insecurity."
"But ... What if the adults will take revenge."
Jon looked across the length of the room with a smile. Bared his perfect teeth like a wolf.
"That would be all the better. If they are stupid enough to try to stop us - then we will welcome them. You have no idea what a man like me can set in motion with the push of a single button. If they show up, we'll wipe out the whole clan at once. We'll put everyone and everything we have on alert. And I mean everything. This city, no, the whole world needs us."
.
.
Where the rest of the clan including Graziella gathered on a slightly higher block, Brooklyn and Goliath glided high above the property. Seeing no one, noting that no lights were on except in one of the garages, and seeing no cars in the yard, they spiraled lower. They landed on the roof of the garage and crouched down. They sniffed, listened and then crawled to the skylight embedded in the roof. Three men stood in the room, more bored than alarmed. One even sat on a chair, fiddling with something that looked semi-familiar to Brooklyn but that he basically didn't care about. His attention was on something else. There was a cage under the skylight. From their position, they couldn't see inside because of the cage's top cover plate. But a pale limp tail hung over the edge of the cage base. Brooklyn growled and felt his eyes light up. His son. These monsters had captured his child and locked him in a cage as if he were an animal. They had all been in cages in one way or another. But to do that to a child was nefarious.
"I'll come in from the ground - you over the skylight as soon as I distract them," Goliath said.
"You're welcome!" hissed Brooklyn.
Joey bared his teeth and let one of the knives dart into his hand again. Those splints were damn sophisticated. It was a good thing he had volunteered to guard Dante. He had no desire to be part of the deal between Tony and Castaway. He had had enough of gargoyles. Especially those who didn't seem to be loners like Dante. The clan would take terrible revenge on Tony and the people who had been there when they found out he had sold their chick to gargoyle butchers. But that's what Dino was waiting for. He had failed to clarify the Dracon succession by sending The Pack after Goliath in Rykers and scheduling Tonys death as collateral damage. But things now would almost sort themselves out. Natural selection. The moment the Manhattan Clan would go after Tony, Dino would in turn send some people into the field. Because the gargoyles were not really reliable in terms of killing, others had to take over. Dino was smart. He would make it look like a gargoyle had killed Tony. Joey didn't need to be there when the syndicate switched leaders in the most unnatural and natural way in the world. He basically didn't care if he followed Dino or Tony.
"You're going to blow a hole in your palm with those things," Carl said.
"I'll be careful. These toys are way too cool for this Dante freak. From now on, they're mine."
"He'll kill you if Tony lets him out of the cage."
"You think Tony's gonna let him back out there? I think the boss is fed up with him and doesn't trust the guy. That's why he's in the cage now and we're out."
"Never say never, Joey," Sven muttered.
"Geez, are you guys still scared shitless of him? Even though he's lying there in the cage, roasted to a pulp? You guys are such pussies-"
Joey winced like the other two as someone banged violently on the garage door from outside.
All three exchanged glances. They hadn't heard a car drive into the yard.
Joey nodded to Carl and Sven, who had already drawn their weapons. The three of them walked toward the entrance, careful to keep to the side in case someone shot through the door.
"Who-" Joey began to shout, at which point the metal door was kicked in and he was buried under the gate and thrown back with that weight on his chest, pinned to the ground and sliding back several feet.
Dizzy and breathless, he saw only swirling colors for a few moments. A purple blur that lifted Sven up and threw him around like a sandbag, even though he was firing wildly. A red vortex that broke through the skylight, landed on the top of the cage and wrapped its tail (tail!) around Carl's neck and threw him off as well before the thing bounced on the floor to finish off the screeching man, all accompanied by animalistic roars. Joey managed to free his upper body from under the door, turn around and get out his radio. In doing so, he unintentionally and uncoordinatedly triggered the mechanism on the splint. And severed his own middle finger with one of the switchblades. Joey shrieked shrilly but out of instinct the panic did not paralyze him at all. Although the radio was immediately greasy and slippery with his own blood, he opened the channel that no one but him knew about and screamed into the radio.
"DINO! The other gargoyles! Granary! Tonight you must-AH!" He groaned as a weight settled on the metal door under which his lower body was still buried. A red hand snatched the blood-soaked radio from his hand and crushed it. Then he felt a blow on his temple.
Brocklyn stepped down from the metal plate under which the bleeding henchmen Tony Dracons lay and turned to the cage. But it was not Nashville who lay in it.
He didn't know how many seconds he stood in front of the cage, speechless and unable to form a clear thought, but suddenly he sensed numerous other bodies in the room.
"That's not Nash!" he heard Broadway cry the moment Graziella appeared beside him and reached through the bars, brushing wild strands of hair behind the unconscious runaway gargoyle's ears as if she had known him for a long time.
"We're too late," Goliath muttered, voicing his first clear thoughts. Brooklyn turned away in a daze while the others clustered around the cage, expressing their confusion and distress.
"Break the lock," he heard Graziella command as if she were not only a member of the clan but a clan leader or second. That should have annoyed him, but he didn't have the nerve for anger right now. He stepped up to Katana and as it was sometimes her talent, she knew exactly what he needed and took him in her arms. He was so tired. Where was their child? Where was their hatchling? Had the Dracons already ... smashed him? He looked around to see if there were any fragments of stone, but when he didn't see any, he turned his attention back to the others. Goliath had torn off the heavy padlock, probably tearing away the whole door in his own frustration, and lifted Dante from the floor. But just as he was about to pull the Italian out of the cage, an electric shock shot through Dante, which also passed over to Goliath, causing him to drop his fellow species and jump away. Grumbling, Goliath rubbed his palms. The shock had obviously jolted Dante out of his swoon, for he gave a long, visibly pained groan and muttered Italian curses as he straightened his upper body.
Then he looked up and stared blankly for a few moments into the varied faces of his unloved comrades around him as they bombarded him with questions.
"What are you doing here?"
"Where's Nashville?"
"Have you seen him?"
"What happened here?"
"Where did they catch you?"
"Do you know where they took Nash?"
Everyone was talking in a jumble. But everyone fell silent as Graziella shrieked again in her brightest child's voice.
"Everyone shut up!" Immediately after, she held a hand to her damp forehead as if her own voice had given her a migraine attack.
She stepped over to Dante in the cage and knelt by him.
"He was captured by Tony, too. He helped Nash and me last week. With what isn't important but he's been checking on me ever since. And he must have tried to free Nash while I was away getting you guys. That's what happened. Wasn't it, Dante?"
The gray gargoyle and the little girl looked each other in the eyes. Kindred spirits took only a second to plan and coordinate a conspiracy, Brooklyn thought. Then Dante nodded and cleared his throat strained. "The bambina is right. I screwed up. Mea culpa," he muttered. Angela smiled encouragingly and also went to Dante's eye level. It was hard to tell if she believed Graziella's tight-lipped tall tale or if she was simply playing along to get to the important questions faster.
"Thank you so much for trying to do that, Dante. Although our clan ... hasn't really been very accommodating to you."
Dante smirked.
"I've been a bit of an ass, too, goldeye. But Nashville didn't deserve that."
He winced as Brooklyn, along with Katana, pushed his way forward. "What didn't he deserve! What do you know? Did they do something to him?"
"I-I didn't mean to say they killed him. He's alive. As far as I know," Dante muttered, fumbling in his inside pockets of his wrinkled suit jacket and in his pants pockets obviously for cigarettes and his Zippo. Brooklyn lifted the indignantly squealing Graziella out of the cage, handed her to Goliath, who passed her to Broadway, who placed her on the floor outside their circle. Pouting, she crossed her arms and also shot a venomous look to Sonny, who had just come in with his helmet under his arm and Lexington, who must have stayed outside as a scout. Even those who were now out of sight of the cage heard Brooklyn's harsh conversation with Dante.
While the Italian reviewed how Nashville had been captured and sold to Quarrymen by Tony (as best he could without contradicting Graziella's version), the girl wandered around the garage. Looked wordlessly down at the unconscious men. When she recognized Joey- the father of Fabio, Michael and Alessio - and saw that he even had a finger torn off (not fatal but funnily enough the "Evil Finger", as her Nonna had always called the middle one) she grinned although that sent new little waves of pain through her head. She felt Sonny looming over her as she removed the black splint from around Joey's wrist. She flicked away a layer of the flexible but visibly strong fabric that made up the splints and saw thin knife blades inside. Four of them. A fifth knife on the floor next to Joey. She bent down, wiped the blood on the knife on her jeans and put it in one of the holes provided and put the splint on herself. Thanks to the Velcro fasteners, they even fit her small wrist.
With the question in her mind what the button was doing, which was embedded in an extension of the fabric and which she could press with a little effort with her little finger, she didn't linger long at all. Sonny gasped as with a movement that resembled a finger twitch, one of the knives shot into her hand. She grinned at that. She didn't like her stupid talent ... but this splint was too useful to leave to stupid Joey. She pulled the dark sleeve of her hoodie over the splint and was about to grab one of the other three that were on the workbench, when Dante screeched again and nagged at one of the other gargoyles.
"I told you, I get shocked when I get pulled out of the cage! The remote is the only way to turn the fucking thing on and off. Only with the four-digit code can you deactivate the thing and take it off."
Graziella looked at Sonny with displeasure, then wandered over to the wall of strong legs, agitatedly twitching tails, and upraised wings of almost every color.
"Try 1234," she called out.
Immediately the wall in front of her parted. Everyone looked at her.
She smiled wryly. "I've been thinking about this. 1234 is the door code for the front door. Tony is an idiot. So try 1234 for the collar, too."
Lexington, crouched behind the still-seated Dante and apparently having opened a small flap on the collar at the back of his neck, shrugged, fixed his large eyes on the control panel, and punched in the four numbers.
A soft, short buzzing sound was heard, then the collar snapped open and fell off Dante's neck. Again, two seconds of stunned silence. Then Lexington started laughing. Then Dante. And Elisa. Despite the general tension, they all managed to wring restrained smiles from each other. The gray gargoyle stood up, stepped out of the cage and past the other gargoyles, and lifted Graziella.
"Oh, Swallow! I thank God for your old man's unspeakable idiocy and for your intelligence!"
He pressed a kiss on her cheek left and right, which she allowed to pass with an indulgent smile. And he kept her in his arms while Goliath approached him.
"Even though you were unconscious. Do you have any idea where those two Quarrymen might have taken Nashville?" Dante's expression became displeased. When his eyes found Katana's, he lowered his ears in a guilty gesture never seen by any of the others. He shook his head.
"I wish I knew."
"But ... just the fact that they took him away is a good sign. It complicates the situation. But it's good," Broadway speculated.
"'Yes,'" Coldfire jumped in. "If they wanted to kill him right away, they would have done it here."
Coldstone, meanwhile, had shoved the bodies of the three humans into the cage and was in the process of sealing the door by crushing the locking mechanism so that the door jammed.
Brooklyn looked unhappily at the three people, who were all unconscious. If they didn't get any of them awake, no one would tell them where to find Nashville. If they even knew where Nash was. As his gaze fell on the fragments and innards of the radio, his expression brightened.
"That one guy!" he blurted out, pointing at Joey, "He radioed Dino! He said something about a granary!"
"Granary?" The clan members looked at each other uncertainly.
Sonny expelled the air, attracting stares.
"What do you know, Sonny?" Katana asked.
The boy raised his head and looked at her seriously.
"I know where Nashville is. But if Joey radioed Dino, then you guys need to get moving now. Because Nashville AND Tony and his boys are going to need you."
Okay - nearly a whole gargoyle clan. Grace, Luca and the Xanatos couple, let's say half a dozen of Tony's guys, the people Dino sends there AND Castaway and of his Quarrymen let's say ... also at least six? Or more? The cleanup crews, the cops, a whole lot of onlookers outside. This transfer location and its immediate vicinity is going to be awfully crowded. And HOW the hell do I get the Wicked Witch of the West side in there? (The part with her will be terribly staged but I want her to be stupid to get into this battle and to eat shit).
That's what happens when you don't know in one chapter where the story is going to go in the next. (Sure I have some scenes in my head where I want to go but I have to get there halfway logically).
Thanks for reading Q.T.